Online catnip: queues are already forming for the social media star’s dining room
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)One of the first things you’ll see as you arrive at Straker’s is the chef-proprietor’s motorcycle. Right there, beside the little entrance, sits social media star Thomas Straker’s lean, handsomely begrimed café racer-style ride. It is an unexpected bit of old school, petrol-headed ornamentation that is, perhaps, at odds with the glossy wholesomeness you might associate with a venture being billed in some quarters as a “TikTok restaurant”. If it jars slightly as an introduction then that is, I think, quite instructive.
Because, yes, OK: Straker is best known as a tousle-haired, butter-foaming king of viral recipes, whose slick, rapid-cut instructional videos have amassed an enormous online audience (he has 1.6 million TikTok followers and an accumulated 2.1 billion views on the platform) and speak to a new mode of lucrative, digital age culinary stardom. But then on the other, he is also a classically trained chef — initially at Ballymaloe and then with stints at The Ledbury and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal — who grew up hunting, foraging and fishing near his family’s smallholding in rural Herefordshire.
